POL S 442 A: Government and Politics of China

   China is now the second largest economy in the world and a growing global power; at the same time, it faces considerable governance challenges at home and an increasingly wary international community abroad, marked by the trade war with the U.S. This course will help you understand the rise of China. It provides an in-depth analysis of the political history, contemporary institutions, and governance issues facing China today. It highlights several major themes from the twentieth century to the present: the role of nationalism, the changing place of markets and private property, and the shifting penetration of the state from the center to the grassroots. The first part of the course addresses China’s modern political history and provides an essential foundation for subsequent topics. It explains the formation of political parties, ideology and nationalism, revolution, state-building, and the planned economy, because these aspects of history continue to shape China in the present. The second part of the course focuses on the political institutions that govern China today, including the organization of the party-state, how the state controls its own agents, how it deploys democratic-seeming institutions like elections, and how it attempts to surveil and control civil society and media. The final part of the course uses the foundations of political history and political institutions to analyze crucial challenges facing China today:  How close has China gotten to its goal of technological self-sufficiency? How did supply chains for so many goods move to China, and what are the implications for business and labor as they are disrupted? How well does the state provide social welfare, and how equal is the social system? What is the status of ethnic minorities? How strong is nationalism, and what is the fate of newly assertive local identities?